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Author: Elaine Pagels
Quotes of Author: Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels _ The Gnostic Gospels
The Gospel of Philip takes up the same theme: Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not reveal himself in the manner {in which} he was, but in the manner in which {they would} be able to see him. He revealed himself to {them all. He revealed himself} to the great as great … {and} to the small as small.69 To the immature disciple, Jesus appears as a child; to the mature, as an old man, symbol of wisdom. As the gnostic teacher Theodotus says, "each person recognizes the Lord in his own way, not all alike.
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Elaine Pagels _ The Gnostic Gospels
The controversy over resurrection, then, proved critical in shaping the Christian movement into an institutional religion. All Christians agreed in principle that only Christ himself-or God-can be the ultimate source of spiritual authority. But the immediate question, of course, was the practical one: Who, in the present, administers that authority? Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with the "living One." They argued that only one's own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition-even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open.
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Elaine Pagels _ Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:
This debate over Genesis revealed a major disagreement among second-century Christians, a disagreement whose outcome would shape church doctrine ever after.
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Elaine Pagels _ The Gnostic Gospels
Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy?
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Elaine Pagels _ Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:
Are we to believe that Adam and Eve actually heard God's footsteps rustling in the garden of Eden, as the text suggests, when it says that Adam and Eve hid themselves,
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Elaine Pagels _ Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:
So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death.
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Elaine Pagels _ Why Religion?: A Personal
No longer married, suddenly I was . From Latin, the name means "emptied." Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body.
book-quote relationships grief loss
Elaine Pagels _ Why Religion?: A Personal
What clear is that meaning may not be something we . We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to meaning.
book-quote grief loss meaning
Elaine Pagels _ Why Religion?: A Personal
Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.
book-quote guilt suffering death
Elaine Pagels _ Why Religion?: A Personal
Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way.
book-quote guilt suffering death
Elaine Pagels _ Why Religion?: A Personal
I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world.
book-quote death religion grief
Elaine Pagels _ Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:
By the beginning of the fifth century Catholic Christians lived as subjects of an empire they could no longer consider alien, much less wholly evil.{...} By the beginning of the fifth century few who dealt with the government firsthand - certainly not Chrysostom and finally not Augustine either - would have identified it with God's reign on earth.
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